There is only so much that algorithms and memories can tell you. 

My Spotify tells me that this month Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ is the song I have listened to the most. Spotify tells me my mood is mellow, like a Sunday afternoon. What it does not tell me is that I miss my sister. 

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It was a Sunday afternoon late in March. At least, I think it was a Sunday afternoon late in March. I know the marigolds were almost done blooming. It was not yet hot, but the promise of a hot Indian summer was in the air. My sister and I were lazing in my room. In April, we will start a new school semester. But, before then, our days were open and free. I am reading, she is drawing. The new Keane song comes on. We both hum along:  

I walked across an empty land
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand
I felt the earth beneath my feet
Sat by the river and it made me complete

We both loved the song. I am not sure why. Maybe it was trending at the time? I do remember that, with time, we forgot about the song as teenagers do until we heard a fresh rendition a few years later–this time on the American Teen TV show, Glee. 

We used to watch Glee on Sunday afternoons. Since we otherwise sang straightjacketed songs in the school choir, we enjoyed watching the flamboyant performance of Glee Club singing songs that we would actually listen to. Our Bollywood sensibilities would rejoice every time a character breaks into a song when big feelings come up.

One of the early–and quite remarkable–songs in the first season of Glee was “Somewhere only we know”. This “version”–popularly known in urban terms as ‘cover’–was younger and brighter in its tonality: the singer clearly enunciating the words, their voices rising above the music. In the original, the music and vocals are deeply enmeshed in each other. 

We liked the Glee Club cover and soon forgot the original. Now, instead of humming, we sang loudly. It never occurred to me to wonder why this song about nostalgia and weariness was so appealing to us. A response came to me later as the song became the background score of my summer of endless Sun-days in Kashmir. The summer that came after the March my sister passed away. The year I played with a starling. The same year the song, which I had heard a million times, took on new meanings. 

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Headphones on, I am writing to my sister sitting on a bench at the garden’s entry when a flock of mynas (starlings) distracts me. They are pecking at the grass noisily, unmindful of my presence. Annoyed, I leave my letters and walk towards them. The mynas scatter and fly away. Except one.  

I try to shoo her away like the others. But, as I turn back to the bench, she follows. Curious, I reverse my steps. The myna matches my movements. Again, I try to shoo it away. But I see it waddling back just as I sit down. Maybe it wants seeds or crumbs. I crumble the biscuit I had brought out with me. The myna makes no attempt to peck at the crumbs. Instead, she waddles away and looks back. I follow the myna with the crumbs in hand and somehow, we end up playing tag. After a while, I get tired and the myna flies away. 

I retreat to the diary of letters to my sister, slipping on my headphones. The following lines are playing

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?

My mother’s family home in Kashmir was a summer retreat. V and I loved it there. Just the previous summer, we spent a month at the house as she recovered from the latest rounds of chemotherapy. She and I would sit at the bench where I now sit with the diary of letters to her. We would often feed the birds together, and I would read, while she would practice with her camera—taking pictures of a bent-over rose bush that my mother’s grandfather planted several decades ago. The rose bush was showing signs of life, despite a harsh winter. V, with a camera in hand, was showing signs of life, as well. 

 The old plum tree near the rose bush was dying. “Remember that year,” I ask V, “when you climbed onto the roof of the car reaching for ripe plums.” She smiles and nods, looking a bit drained. “I remember,” she says. 

I had watched her, terrified she might fall; instructing her to be careful while collecting the plums she had plucked in a basket. But V tells me that she asked me to help her, to look out for her. In remembering the conversation alone, I think, perhaps, I liked the version where I was the one who volunteered to help her—to look out for her.

 I feel tired now. Since every day is a “sun day” in Kashmir, with nothing to do, I take a nap.  

  The next day, the myna returns and our play resumes. When she flies away, I remember a summer of our pre-teen years. There was a war on, in the upper regions of Kashmir, bordering Pakistan: The Kargil war. But, here at the house in Srinagar, we were oblivious. We rarely went outside the boundaries of the house, yet we were thoroughly entertained. We ran around the cars, the porch, the garden playing tag. Older and taller, I should have been ahead of her. But she was fast and athletic. She always caught up with me. 

Is this the place I have been dreaming of? 

I write to V, about my memories, about more-than-human encounters, about growing up together. And now having to grow old alone. I am vaguely aware that there were others around, that my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins were there with us. Another year, when we returned to Srinagar, we helped our grandfather with a rickety old refrigerator. When it was finally installed, my grandfather took a nap on the couch. His snores matched the loud, robotic hum of the refrigerator. V and I were tickled endlessly, laughing till our stomachs hurt. 

When I remember it’s just me and her. The whole world fades into the background. The game with the myna was also a private game of tag. Just me and the starling. We play until she flies away. 

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Looking at my Spotify Sound Capsule, I think how Sundays and summers were never the same again. The lazy afternoons are long gone. ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ is now a totem for my yearning to return to a time when nostalgia was not a feeling but a concept. Like you knew the song made you feel something, but you had not yet felt that feeling yourself.

The music used to only strike a chord and the lyrics were for belting out, imitating a show we watched, imagining our voices to mean something in a world that lay wide open in front of us. Now, the surface notes acquired new depths. Like when you read something at different times and pick up new inflections. Like when you walk across a path enough number of times, it takes on new shapes under your feet. 

The band Keane, when asked about the song’s meaning, have often responded saying that it is about a place, time and memory that meant something to the songwriter, but it can also be about any place, any time and any memory that might mean something to those who are listening. And I was listening–Is this the place we used to know? Is this the place we used to love?  

In playing with the myna and writing to my sister with “Somewhere Only We Know’ in the background, I conjugated my grief, made new shapes and patterns with it. I carved out some wiggle room to remember the place we used to know, the place we loved—not only a physical space but one I recollected from past summers and Sundays.  

This could be the end of everything

So, why don’t we go somewhere only we know?
Somewhere only we know. 

The place of my grief is not a place my sister or my Spotify playlist will know. That place sits within me. I make and remake that place as I draw patterns between the times I shared with V, and the times I have not. After 12 years of losing her, my memories are now unsure yet intense. An algorithm reminds me that I miss my sister. What it does not tell me is that, in missing her, I think of Sunday afternoons when life was normal only because that life came before this one—the one I am living now. That life became a level with no apparent way to reach for it, no car to climb onto and pluck moments. In any case, even in memory, it was V on the roof of the car, not me. 

I am getting tired, and I need somewhere to begin. 

So, I begin with my song for Sundays as I add texture and depth to an algorithm that knows nothing of my grief but simply reads it as a mood.